Recent years have witnessed significant improvements in broadcasting, particularly the television broadcasting transitioned from analog to digital. In the current scenario of television broadcast, irrespective of the analog or digital television broadcasting, the interactivity with television is highly required for enhancing subscriber's experience. To be genuinely interactive, the viewer must be able to alter the viewing experience or return information to the broadcaster, wherein the return path, return channel or back channel may use a telephone, mobile SMS (text messages), radio, digital subscriber lines (DSL) or cable.
The quick response (QR) codes have been conventionally used for sending data to mobiles phones as a camera readable 2D bar-code. Furthermore, inserting objects in the video for context extraction by an interactive television application is still a challenge in the technical domain. In order to achieve enhanced interaction of subscriber with television, it is very much required to have quick response (QR) codes that can broadcast video which is not only readable by a camera but also by a video analyzing software module.
Lots of efforts have been made to develop user's interactivity with television using multimedia home platform (MHP) and MPEG-4 (Moving Picture Experts Group). Still there are certain disadvantages associated with the existing technologies, such as the level of interactivity possible with the proposed solution is not achievable using multimedia home platform (MHP).
In multimedia home platform (MHP) based solutions, where the object carousel model is used, the application states are predefined. Hence, for every interaction, the next screen needs to be fetched from the carousel, which is the limiting factor for the interactivity to be in simple predefined states. It may not be possible to support entry of free-form text in such an environment. Other solutions such as enhanced television binary interchange Format (EBIF) and Tru2way are only applicable for cable systems.
In order to achieve tagging the broadcast content for enhancing viewer interactivity and experience with the broadcaster and to have a separate path of interactivity from that of broadcast there is a long felt need to develop a synchronized interactive television application which can work with plurality of customer premise equipment (CPE) as well as secondary communication devices.
However, the existing method and systems are not capable of providing tagged broadcast content for enhancing viewer interactivity and experience with the broadcaster and a separate path of interactivity using interactive television application. Some of them known to us are as follows:
US20090108057 by Mu et al. teaches about the application of quick response (QR) codes with mobile devices for providing interactive applications and services to a user via the mobile devices. The patent doesn't discuss about decoding the quick response (QR) code at set top box (STB), which is not a mobile device and the quick response (QR) code is not scanned using a camera.
WO0158159A1 to Eric E et al. teaches about an interactive content preservation and customization technology which is placed at the broadcast facility to ensure reliable transmission of the interactive content to a local subsystem. The problem addressed particularly by this patent is related to a delivery (head-end) side solution and pertains to reliable delivery of interactive content where the interactive code is used as a bookmark to enter interactive content into the video before broadcasting.
GB2466456 to Loder teaches about an interactive display system which further comprises a processing system for providing information relating to a plurality of selectable elements to a broadcast system and a receiver for receiving from the broadcast system information relating to the plurality of selectable elements. The problem addressed particularly by this patent is related to a system on a television where there are multiple selections available and each selection produces a code which can be communicated over phone by user. It is probably used to build a casino game for interactive television.
Rauschenbach in “A scalable interactive TV service supporting synchronized delivery over broadcast and broadband networks” teaches about various types of portable and mobile multimedia capable terminals available and widely used desire to use them to access TV services and additional content, by way of using smart routing to select the best-suited network allowing inter-network content synchronization.
SYNC TV in “SYNC TV Interactive broadcast participation.” provides the vital link that has been missing from broadcast media since its inception: an instant means of response.
Hakola et al. in “Print Access” teaches about the hybrid solutions of the print and electronic media by using printed codes. In the project different code types and their potentiality as PrintAccess codes were investigated. The results showed that the code based integration between the camera phone and printed media are technologically mature and there are opportunities for commercial applications.
The above mentioned prior arts fail to disclose an efficient method and system for designing and implementation of synchronized interactive television applications. The prior art approaches also fail to separate the path of interactivity from that of broadcast.
Thus, in the light of the above mentioned background art, it is evident that, there is a need for such a solution to achieve higher interactivity with television and for improving user's experience. There is a long felt need to develop a synchronized interactive television that can utilize separate path of interactivity from that of broadcast.